‘Sideways’ Returns, Uncorked for Japan

From left, Katsuhisa Namase, Fumiyo Kohinata, Kyoka Suzuki and Rinko Kikuchi in the new Sideways.Credit
20th Century Fox Film Corporation and Fuji Television Network

Los Angeles

HERE’S the pitch: Two guys, old college buddies. One’s a has-been TV actor, the other a never-been writer. The actor is about to get married, and the writer loves wine, so before the wedding they drive up the coast of California for a weeklong vineyard-visiting road trip.

Sound familiar? Perhaps that’s because it’s the premise for “Sideways,” the 2005 Oscar nominee for best picture (and winner for best adapted screenplay).

This time, though, it’s a little different: the bonding friends are Japanese.

As film industries in China, Russia, Japan and India have grown exponentially, particularly when it comes to homegrown fare, United States studios have taken the phrase “Think globally, act locally” to heart. Nearly every studio has set up an international operation for producing and distributing original movies made in local languages. Now a handful of those studios are scouring their catalogs, seeking films (box-office smashes and middling performers alike) to remake for new audiences.

The Walt Disney Company is turning its “High School Musical” franchise into a cottage industry, redoing the teen song-and-dance phenomenon one country at a time. A new version of “Cellular,” the 2004 kidnapping thriller starring Kim Basinger, has already come out in China. And Japanese translations of the Patrick Swayze-Demi Moore blockbuster “Ghost” and the Melanie Griffith-Harrison Ford hit “Working Girl” are in development.

The Japanese version of “Sideways” (which for the moment is still being called “Sideways”) is one of the most intriguing of these cross-cultural experiments. As in the original, the action takes place in California and the road trip involves plenty of wine talk, a leather-harness-clad chase, a jealous-rage beating and a wine-spittoon guzzle.

Plenty of other details, however, have been changed. The two male characters (Michio and Daisuke instead of Miles and Jack) now head from Los Angeles to Napa Valley, instead of traipsing up to Santa Barbara. While wine sales are on the rise in Japan — thanks in part to the comic-book sensation “Kami no Shizuku,” or “The Drops of God,” about a heroic odyssey to find the best wines in the world — a lesser-known wine region like Santa Barbara would still resonate little with audiences. And heading to Napa allowed the filmmakers to weave in some local landmarks. “You can’t do a road trip in California without going over the Golden Gate Bridge,” said Cellin Gluck, the new film’s director.

But you can, it seems, remake “Sideways” without bashing merlot. The memorable rant by Paul Giamatti’s Miles (“If anyone orders merlot, I’m leaving,” he bellowed, before using some saltier language to express his hatred of the wine) is nowhere to be found.

When the producers of the new “Sideways” set out to shoot at California wineries, the response was less than enthusiastic. Though the original sparked a surge in pinot noir sales and wine tourism, it also led to a drop in merlot sales. As Terry Joanis, marketing manager of the Frog’s Leap winery, explained: “Not everybody grows pinot noir. A lot of people grow merlot.”

But after a campaign explaining the filmmakers’ varietal agnosticism, Frog’s Leap, Beringer and Chandon were among the wineries that signed on, along with restaurants and tourist spots in the area. In the resulting scenes each location gets a plug that approaches parody. There are signs visible in nearly every scene, close-ups of wine labels and real-life employees, in bit parts, stiffly reciting lines like “Welcome to Old Faithful Geyser, Calistoga, California.”

Mr. Gluck defends the plugs as “payback, in a good way.” He explained, “When you’re a small film, that’s sometimes all you have to offer.” (The Japanese film was made for $3 million; the original cost $17 million.) “We didn’t set out to make a tourism film,” he said. But he added, “If there’s going to be a benefit, let it be for those who helped us out.”

Executives at Fox International Productions were surprised when their counterparts at Fuji TV, one of Japan’s biggest television and film producers, proposed the remake nearly a year ago. “We thought, ‘Wow, that movie?’ ” said Sanford Panitch, president of Fox International. But he knew enough to recognize what he didn’t know. “If we’re making films for the Japanese market, we have to make them the way the Japanese make them,” he said.

Toru Miyazawa, deputy director of sales and acquisitions for Fuji TV, said the modest size of the original (and the fact that it did little business in Japan) lent it to being redone. “Obviously it doesn’t make sense to remake ‘Titanic’ or ‘Star Wars,’ anything too big,” he said, explaining that he had been drawn to “Sideways” because “it’s a good comedy, but not a broad stupid comedy.” The international travels (and the cultural dislocations) of the main characters, he added, would be interesting to people in their late 30s and early 40s, the movie’s main audience.

The practice of Hollywood studios remaking movies in foreign languages is not new. When talkies began, studios sought ways to keep silent films’ international audiences. One solution was practiced by Laurel and Hardy who, in the 1930s, would shoot five versions of a movie — in English, French, German, Italian and Spanish. And while Bela Lugosi shot the 1931 “Dracula” during the day, Carlos Villarías played the title role for the Spanish-language version on the same sets each night.

“Sideways” is a fully sanctioned remake, done with the blessing of the original filmmakers — sort of. “I don’t know a damn thing about it, but I hope it’s better than the original,” joked Alexander Payne, the co-writer and director of “Sideways.” “No, I’m really delighted. I got a check for it, and the check cleared.”

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In other words, Mr. Payne, who has an executive producer credit on the Japanese version (“Oh, I do?”), had nothing to do with the remake, because the standard movie contract grants studios the right to do whatever they want with their product “in perpetuity.” Still, Mr. Payne received a courtesy call about this project from Fox.

“I cared desperately about ‘Sideways’ while making it, but now it’s behind me,” he explained. “So it has its own life, and if part of its life is having a twin in a parallel universe, then so be it.”

As much as “Sideways” belongs to Mr. Payne and his co-writer, Jim Taylor, the Japanese version is, like an American indie, close to the heart of Mr. Gluck, who is of Japanese and American descent and spent much of his childhood attending American schools in Japan. Mr. Gluck’s bilingual film experience dates to 1989, when he assisted on “Black Rain,” the Ridley Scott film about an American police officer (Michael Douglas) in Japan.

Not every studio is making such personal productions in foreign countries. While Disney is tailoring each “High School Musical” to the local territory (the first two were TV movies made for the Disney Channel; the third took in more than $90 million domestically at the box office and another $160 million internationally), they’re still part of a larger franchise. “High School Musical” has already been remade in Spanish for Latin America. Up next: versions for Russia and for China, where instead of playing basketball the boys in the movie practice martial arts.

Warner Brothers went with car chases and explosions for its first Chinese-language remake. Last year’s translation of “Cellular,” “Bo Chi Tung Wa” (“Connected”), got positive reviews and made $6.5 million at the box office, a decent tally in that growing market.

Paramount is taking “baby steps” in the foreign remake game with the development of a Japanese version of “Ghost,” according to Andrew Cripps, its president for international theatrical distribution and marketing. “ ‘Ghost’ has a lot of elements that appeal to a Japanese audience: the emotionality, the sentimentality,” he said. “Like ‘Sideways,’ ‘Ghost’ is a dialogue-driven drama.”

The studio has been fielding offers from producers in other countries to remake films like “Trading Places” and “What Women Want,” but Mr. Cripps said he is waiting to see how Fox’s project goes first. “There’s a lot to learn from ‘Sideways’ for us as well,” he said.

Even though studio executives have little idea what will get lost in the translation of these hits, Fox International has five more films — two from the 1950s, two from the 1980s and one from the 1990s — in consideration to be remade in various countries. Mr. Panitch would reveal only one: “Working Girl,” which is in the early stages of development for Japan.

Much like “Sideways,” that film is an agile mix of comedy, romance and astute cultural observation — in this case about women in the workplace — and it had six Oscar nominations. (“Sideways” had five.) But “Working Girl,” which follows a Staten Island secretary’s big-business climb in Manhattan, is more of a fairy tale.

“There are many aspects of the original that will need to be changed for it to work for 2010 in a Tokyo business setting,” Mr. Panitch said. “We think it is inspired to reimagine the film in this way.”

The filmmakers hope the Japanese version will find more success than NBC’s 1990 sitcom offshoot, starring Sandra Bullock. That ran for 12 episodes.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page AR1 of the New York edition with the headline: ‘Sideways’ Returns, Uncorked For Japan. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe